Coming off the deadliest year in San Francisco for overdose deaths since 2020, San Francisco officials gathered Thursday evening in the Tenderloin to discuss what progress has been made in addressing crime and drug trafficking in The City.
“We had to face that grim number that just came out regarding the loss of life to overdoses,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who emphasized that her focus in recent months has been on detaining and charging drug dealers.
“At this point, we have filed 411 motions to detain drug dealers while their cases are open,” she said. “That is a portion of the overall cases that we file; our focus for those motions are repeat offenders, people who have two, three, sometimes even four or five arrests for drug dealing.”
Joined by San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott and San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, the panel discussed some of the main concerns of the neighborhood, including homelessness, drug usage, and overall safety.
This is the second town hall organized by St. Anthony’s Foundation and the District Attorney’s Office. The first was held last August following a shooting, and Thursday’s meeting came on the heels of a mass shooting just last week that left one dead and four wounded.
“Officers are doing a tremendous amount of work in the drug market, they make arrests every single day,” said Scott. “But the bottom line is, we have to continue to disrupt this market.”
Overdose deaths in San Francisco rose to 806 in 2023 — a 24% increase from the year before — despite renewed efforts from local law enforcement and state agencies to address the drug addiction crisis over the past year.
Last May, Newsom activated the California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard to aid local departments, leading to seizures of fentanyl, just as the number of deaths peaked in August.
Scott said on Thursday that The City’s partnerships with federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are still going strong.
“They're a part of our night operations,” he said. “Last night, we did a pretty significant operation that ended up with 24 people arrested from the drug market.”
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Miyamoto added that while putting more people in jail isn’t necessarily the goal, his department has been focusing on people with substance use disorders in their jails and connecting them to treatment.
“For many years, drug dealers and drug users have not been a part of our population, that was part of our positive efforts to make sure that we didn't criminalize this behavior,” he said. “Now that we're making these efforts to curtail some of these challenges, we do have increasing participants in our drug program.”
Community members in attendance wrote questions about specific parts of the Tenderloin, including sections of Jones Street, Golden Gate Avenue, and Market Street, pockets afflicted by violence and drug dealing.
Scott said that his department has assigned “night captains” to certain hot spots with different strategies for handling these issues, from bringing in other officers from other parts of The City for additional help to dispersing the crowd.
These changes have been made since the last town hall held in August, he said, to mixed success.
“Sometimes we get good compliance, sometimes we don't,” said Scott.
According to Jenkins, her office and SFPD have been working with Ismail J. Ramsey, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, since his confirmation in March 2023 to create a “comprehensive plan” to improve street conditions in the Tenderloin.
“One thing that we were able to develop was a joint prosecution strategy,” she said. “Normally, the federal government focuses on the higher level suppliers, people who you do not necessarily see out on the street dealing drugs, but he was open to the concept of his office taking on more street level dealer prosecution.”
But for some residents, it still doesn’t feel like enough.
“What we want is just a decent, safe community,” said Sogolon, 75, who declined to provide his last name to The Examiner. “We want what’s on Nob Hill, across Van Ness…but how do we get it?”
